Trance - A Thriller By Danny Boyle

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing a delightful little Danny Boyle movie called 'Trance', starring James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel, the film is about an art autioneer who is involved in a robbery, and yet is hit on the head, and thus after the painting goes missing, cannot remember where he mislaid it, and thus sees a hypnotherapist, who puts him into trance states in order to see into his subconscious and recover the painting.

This film was directing by Danny Boyle, director of the 28 series, Millions, and the Olympic opening ceremony, and is partially based on a 2001 TV movie which Boyle was involved with of the same name. The film is a thriller which blends dreams and reality, in which the audience is often unaware as to which state we are viewing the scene through, and scenes will start out by making the audience think that they are 'real' and will then be discovered to be trance scenes. This is why the film makes no attempt to give the two states different visual identities, so as to blur the line between reality and fantasy for the audience, a smart move, given the way the director tries to trick the audience, often succeeding!

Rosario Dawson plays the films hypnotherapist, and who sees a way to gain from the situation, Dawson succeeds in carrying a large part of the film, and manages to play a double character, a woman who is seen in two different ways by the main character, and who has to seem like a new character with a history and no history simultaneously, Vincent Cassel plays a villain who masterminds the operation, and James McAvoy is pretty much a piece of furniture, in his role as Simon, the conduit through whom we see this action unfold. It is bloody hard to write about this film without giving too much away, and despite this being bloody frustrating, it is, in a sense a tribute to the tightness of the plot, with this story being so complex that it is near impossible to analyze it without giving the game away, however the film deals with themes of how we view people, and how our first opinions of people are indicative of how we view their actions later on.

My only criticism of this film is that towards the end is that the twists and turns of the plot can become frustrating, and it can seem too much towards the end and seems as if the director is 'playing' with the audience! In conclusion this is a tightly plotted and fun film which has a great plot and good performances from its leads, in particular that of Rosario Dawson. Rating: A-

Elizabeth: The choice is yours. Do you want to remember or do you want to forget?